Meanwhile, at that same moment, Ryusei's main body felt the signal threading through the fragment-network he had left behind.
The clone hunting for the Hyūga vessel had finished its task.
Ryusei didn't hesitate.
A single seal.
A pulse of intent.
The clone was reverse-summoned straight to him in the middle of his clash with Ashura.
It appeared right behind him for only a heartbeat before dissolving into his body, fusing perfectly.
Ryusei absorbed the full memory load in an instant.
The Tenseigan.
The techniques.
The chakra he had drained from the vessel.
All of it rushed into him in a single breath.
His reserves surged, overflowing.
He now had more chakra than he possessed even at his natural peak.
But at the same time… something shifted.
Ashura's body trembled, his expression flickering, his chakra twisting unnaturally.
It wasn't just him anymore.
Some older presence slipped into him, as if another will had latched onto Ashura the moment Ryusei evolved.
The battlefield lurched for both of them.
And far away from that clash, the Hyūga vessel clone had already begun operating on the captured energy core.
With Ryusei's adaptive physiology, it took immediate control, stripping the structure clean.
Hiashi was left with only the raw power he had already siphoned, a temporary reserve at best.
Which meant Ryusei's allies should have finished him easily.
They almost did.
Right before the final blow landed, Hiashi's body jolted violently.
The last dregs of stolen Hamura-chakra flared, compressing into a single wild burst.
It detonated outward in a shockwave that ripped the ground apart and blasted everyone around him off their feet.
For a moment, none of them could move.
Hiashi himself stood half-collapsed, burned through, barely alive… yet something in him was still changing.
Not healing.
Not stabilizing.
Changing.
As if the last scraps of stolen power weren't fading out, but mutating into something else entirely again for some reason.
While he waited a few more heartbeats for the clone's memories to settle completely and for his new body and eyes to finish syncing, Ryusei scanned the battlefield again.
Ashura, directly in front of him, was now surrounded by a strange, otherworldly dome, as if something else was pushing into him from beyond.
Hiashi's body, in the distance, was also warping in that unnatural state.
Ryusei also picked up something else. Hiashi had wrung every last drop of power out of the side-branch members in the clan, draining them to feed the vessel.
But once their eyesight powers dried out, they didn't die. They simply collapsed where they stood, in the village, unconscious, spent, their bodies shaking from the strain.
Hashirama and Orochimaru were locked in a brutal clash nearby, with Orochimaru clearly losing, running on the last parts of his chakra just as Ryusei had been moments earlier.
Further out, Tobirama stood beyond the barrier, cautiously sensing everything from afar.
Thanks to his sensing, Ryusei easily deduced what had happened: Madara had already taken Kushina. Minato was dead. Duy was still alive.
Ryusei felt it all. Every shift, every loss, every fracture inside the barrier.
The next thing he did was simple and immediate.
Ryusei exhaled once, letting his awareness spill outward, then released a portion of his newly restored chakra in a wide, controlled pulse.
His physiology let that chakra slip through the environment as if his presence briefly dissolved into the world itself, fusing with its natural flow and riding it outward in every direction, and it spread far enough to reach every ally he needed it to currently, exactly how he wanted… without losing strength along the way.
They instantly felt their reserves surge back to life, even if only partially.
Most of it he directed toward Orochimaru, who needed it the most.
Meanwhile, still across him, Hagoromo finally opened his eyes through Ashura's body in a single, heavy breath.
Ashura was gone.
Replaced completely.
The vast, translucent dome encircling Konoha flickered once and then collapsed, its light dissolving like mist.
Every soul that had been maintaining it, the past Kage, the guardians, even the fragments of Hagoromo's own lingering spirit previously sacrificed to a significant extent, all burned out at once, pouring their remaining strength into forcing him into the living world.
For the first time in nearly a millennium, Hagoromo stood in a biological body again. And it felt wrong.
The flesh was foreign, the heartbeat too loud, the air too sharp. His presence alone reshaped the vessel, the chakra density also skyrocketing as his true soul overwrote the last remnants of Ashura's as well.
But there was no joy. No pride. No relief.
Only a deep, solemn heaviness.
Hagoromo was nowhere near happy that this moment had arrived, and especially not like this.
It was not because he replaced his own son. It was because it shouldn't have ever happened like this.
Not so soon.
Not at this terrible cost.
It wasn't sentimentality about Ashura.
To manifest like this, he had burned through too much spiritual energy that he had accumulated inside the Pure Land for centuries for the original plan.
A plan he and Gamamaru had waited a thousand years for.
A plan that relied on not interfering.
On waking one day inside an ideal vessel, decades later, a perfect lineage candidate, a blond, blue-eyed hero-type with astronomical potential, capable of reaching dimensions far beyond ordinary Ōtsutsuki hybrids.
Someone who would easily surpass Ashura's diluted quarter-Ōtsutsuki blood, the one that carried even only half of Hagoromo's own heritage during his past life, hence it was obviously very unfit for the true peak Hagoromo intended, and rise to a level capable of rivaling the higher-tier Ōtsutsuki still drifting through the void.
But that future was now damaged.
Once he manifested fully, once he burned this much power and left this level of trace in the living world, repeating the same cycle later would become nearly impossible.
The "perfect reincarnation window" they had been aiming for would be far harder to secure.
Too much interference always left footprints, weakening destiny, limiting reincarnation flow, and denying the ideal vessel they had carefully steered fate toward for centuries.
And, paradoxically, the worst of all…
He had lost the advantages of the Pure Land.
There, he had infinite reach.
Infinite knowledge.
Access to every soul that ever lived and died.
A vantage point no living being, even an Ōtsutsuki to an extent, could match.
Hidden. Untouchable.
A silent architect with complete conceptual freedom.
Being alive was, in many ways, a downgrade.
But the situation had finally forced his hand completely.
He had watched Ryusei's impossible rise from the shadows for quite some time, watched the world spiral out of the careful balance he and Gamamaru had set.
He held back as long as he could.
Longer than he should have.
And only when everything collapsed into this single moment, the barrier breaking, Madara moving, Ryusei ascending beyond what this age could contain, did he finally accept what it meant:
His passivity had been a mistake.
And now the nuclear option had been used.
Hagoromo let out a long, steady breath from Ashura's reshaped lungs.
"So be it," he thought, solemn and burdened. There was no going back.
At the same time, not far from there, Hiashi's frozen body twisted again.
However, what rose from it was no longer Hiashi at all.
It became the strongest backhand Hagoromo had prepared besides reviving himself. The eldest son of Hamura, his twin brother.
Kazuki Ōtsutsuki, his 'nephew'. Kazuki had always been unnaturally talented. Not only far above his younger brother, who later founded the Hyūga clan, but, even more strangely, more talented than Hagoromo's own two sons, Asura and Indra.
Eventually, from Kazuki, both the 'Ōtsutsuki clan' on the moon and the Kaguya clan on earth were formed.
He left for the moon with Hamura after leaving a small line of offspring behind, which made the Kaguya.
Only Hagoromo's real soul, fully present in the living world again, had enough power to summon him now.
Hiashi's body, by sheer coincidence of lineage and chakra structure, turned out to be a strangely fitting vessel for Kazuki.
The compatibility even hinted that it might push his power higher than before.
Hagoromo controlled him directly, using him like a carefully crafted puppet, while the centuries of space for refinement in the Pure Land filled the vessel with a fully completed skillset.
If his original body had been preserved, like Asura's, it would have been ideal, but the Dead Bone Pulse constantly damaged and replaced Kazuki's cells, shortening his lifespan and making the original body essentially useless for revival. Reviving it wouldn't have fixed its flaws.
Kazuki had always been unique.
He was the only user in history who held both Kaguya's Ash-Killing Bones and a fully awakened Dead Bone Pulse, something that resurfaced in the earthly Kaguya clan only once in several centuries.
The earthly Kaguya, however, had long fallen from its origin.
In the harsh archipelago of what today is considered the 'Land of Water', where, from the beginning, the constant wars, political pressure, and isolation shaped their fate, their strength made them convenient scapegoats.
Their territory was fragmented, their society cut off, and the clan fell into repeated cycles of forced isolation and inbreeding, which slowly bred madness, then weakness, then even more isolation.
They eventually forgot almost everything about their heritage. The Dead Bone Pulse devolved into a crude weapon, their sage bodies were used without any refinement, and their history eroded until they were little more than violent remnants of something far greater.
Kazuki, who had never suffered that decline, returned now through Hiashi's transformed body, carrying the ancient power intact and even 'perfected'.